Convivialism discovers the subject: A mostly appreciative commentary on the Third Convivialist Manifesto

Abstract

The Third Convivialist Manifesto marks a shift: while its two predecessors located the displacement of conviviality in a material-economic logic, its current iteration relocates it in a psycho-political one. It foregrounds ‘the subjective’ – diversity, identity, and the struggle for recognition – as the dynamic shaping contemporary polarization and (de-)solidarization. Writing as scholars in the interpretive, phenomenological, and social-constructivist tradition, we welcome this turn to the subjective, while finding it worthy of immanent critique. The Manifesto's promising appreciation of psychic life is constrained by the Hegelianism it imports through Honneth's theory of recognition, which renders all conflict as ‘struggle’ and treats diversity as something to be transcended rather than negotiated.